Quick linking post — was quoted over on Skepchick in re Richard Dawkins’ latest nonsense, wherein he rails against warning rape victims about rape discussion on college campuses. I need to write a fuller post about how exactly people are getting this wrong, but this is a great one-two punch.

Dawkins is right about one thing: Secular Safezones have an important place, especially in areas where being non-religious (or not belonging to the majority religion) can lead to marginalization. But if he acknowledges that, how can he argue that same care isn’t warranted for those coping with PTSD from rape, assault, or other trauma? Does Richard Dawkins think there isn’t enough oppression to go around? That if he shows compassion for victims of assault or rape, his pet cause won’t get enough recognition? Or is the reality more damning?

I was cued to write this mini-rant by a conversation on Twitter. I don’t really feel that I should have to explain the null hypothesis to people within this community, but in contexts like sexual assault and rape, it seems that all proportional skepticism goes right out the window.

Ami Angelwings (of Escher Girls fame) tweeted about accusations, and how the accusation that “she’s making it all up” is actually itself an accusation, and needs to be vetted out. She went on to say that the null hypothesis in this case is not that “she’s making it up”. Someone I greatly respect in the skeptical community replied to my retweeting that, saying “it is, give evidence”.

Yeah, it might really be a quote by TJ Kincaid, given some corroborative evidence, but the exact wording of the quote cannot be found anywhere else on the internet presently. Better to damn him by what we can demonstrate he really said, and we can demonstrate he said something very close in 2006.

However, no, you probably shouldn’t damn him for holding a terrible opinion in 2006 that he’s since walked back. Not that there isn’t lots else to damn him about.

Nearly twenty years ago, when I was a sixteen year old wide-eyed innocent who believed the human race is generally good, I was victimized by someone’s lies. I told the story on this blog in hopes of achieving some measure of catharsis for myself, and providing real support to others for whom the same sort of lie had damaged their lives. However, I recognized later that the reason I got off so easy actually meant many people who were really hurt would never see justice, and that this was a problem with society that I would have traded more personal pain to see righted.

Today, someone who ostensibly agrees with me on the existence of the overarching problem with society threw those lies back in my face, attacking me because I disagreed with her that transgender folks should be protected from her attacks, in an effort to poison my Google search results for my name. That someone is Cathy Brennan. And she’s in totally appropriate company in the attempt at poisoning my search results — the same slander is also posted on A Voice For Men.Continue reading “Quick, while I have the TERFs and MRAs distracted, go solve all the problems!”→

One of the major themes hit upon by Richard Dawkins’ most recent attempt at creating an objective scale of relative harm, much to the detriment of everyone who’s been harmed by things he’s decreed as zero bad, is that he did not find his own sexual assault particularly bad insofar as he had a support network of other people who were assaulted the same way.

His own encounter was brief, and he did not find it to be particularly off-putting except for an explicit description of the “cremasteric reflex” which makes me cringe just to hear it. He does not recall whether or not he knew of any of his compatriots having been mistreated more than the once. He did not report it to the authorities, but he did report it to his friends, who supported him because they experienced it themselves.

I would very much like it if people stopped treating Dawkins as the Secular Pope. We don’t want any “leaders” in this movement, and yet friends of the secular movement will bow and scrape, and foes will treat him as the King of Atheism whose decrees are handed down from on high for all to internalize. Hell, half the time we can barely decipher what he’s saying. Take Twitter for example. A 140 character limit does the man no justice whatsoever — he does not wear “pithy” well.